Bible in One Year

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Alex Buchanan was well known as a ‘pastor to the pastors’. He was profoundly deaf in one ear, with only 5% hearing in the other, and one side of his face was paralysed after he suffered nerve damage during major surgery. I remember hearing him speak about God’s love and he kept repeating the words, ‘God loves you unconditionally, wholeheartedly and continually.’

When he finished his talk he came up to me and said, ‘Do you believe that God approves of you?’ I said, ‘Actually, I really struggle with that because I know things about myself that mean I find it difficult to believe that God approves of me.’ He replied, ‘We all struggle with that. But God wants you to know that he approves of you. He wants you to know he loves you unconditionally, wholeheartedly and continually.’

If I were asked to summarise what I thought the Bible was all about in one word – apart from the word ‘Jesus’ – I would choose the word ‘love’. Twice in today's New Testament passage John writes, ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8,16). The word ‘love’ is used widely in our society. Nowhere in the Bible does it say, ‘Love is God’. In other words, it is God who defines what love is rather than the other way around. God is love.

This is the message you need to understand yourself, meditate on constantly and speak about to the world: ‘God is love’.

Here is the answer to the greatest longing of the world today. People are looking for love. Their hearts are searching. When you really know God’s love for you, your life is transformed. As we will see in the New Testament passage for today, God’s love is at the heart of each of the four keys to overcoming unhealthy fear in your life: ‘There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear’ (v.18).

To describe someone as ‘confident’ is usually meant as a compliment. But, there is a right and wrong form of confidence. The wrong form of confidence involves valuing yourself over and against God. This is arrogance. The right form of confidence involves valuing yourself in and through Christ. Confidence in the natural world is self-reliance. In the spiritual world, it is God-reliance. Supremely, it involves confidence in the presence of God.

Jackie Pullinger has spent her life working with the poor and destitute, triad gang members, heroin and opium addicts. She has helped thousands to come off drugs through the power of the Holy Spirit. She has seen transformation in numerous lives and has made a huge impact on the city of Hong Kong.

Jackie wrote, ‘I have spent over half my life in a dark, foul smelling place because I had a “vision” of another city ablaze with light, it was my dream. There was no more crying, no more death or pain. The sick were healed, addicts set free, the hungry filled. There were families for orphans, homes for the homeless, and new dignity for those who lived in shame. I had no idea how to bring this about but with “visionary zeal” imagined introducing the Walled City people to the one who could change it all: Jesus.’

Vision is a ‘holy discontent’ – a deep dissatisfaction with what is, combined with a clear grasp of what couldbe. It is a picture – ‘a mental sight’ – of the future that inspires hope.

Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision is a nightmare! But vision combined with action can change the world.

Joseph Lister, the nineteenth-century medic, is known as ‘the father of antiseptic surgery’. Lister was disturbed by the high proportion of patients who died from post-operative infections.

He became convinced that infinitesimal microbes, invisible to the naked eye, were causing the infections. He began to develop a number of antiseptic solutions with which to treat the wounds. Sure enough, the proportion of patients dying from infections decreased.

In a similar way, there are evil spiritual forces at work in our world today. They cannot be seen, but they wreak havoc in people’s lives, causing them to fall into temptation, moving evil people into positions of national power, manipulating people’s emotions, tearing them apart and destroying them.

But just as Lister’s contemporaries dismissed his theory of destructive microbes, many people today are ignorant or dismissive of spiritual realities. Yet you have the powerful spiritual ‘antiseptic’ to use against these destructive forces. It is vital that you learn to do so.

Fellowship – it’s a wonderful word. It’s what you were made for. It satisfies the deepest longings of your heart. It is the answer to loneliness. Nothing in this life compares with it. It starts now and goes on forever.

There is no greater joy in life than fellowship. John wants his readers to enjoy the same fellowship he has: ‘We want you to enjoy this, too. Your joy will double our joy!’ (1 John 1:3, MSG).

Koinonia, the Greek word used for fellowship, is almost untranslatable. It expresses a relationship of great intimacy and depth. It even became the favourite expression for the marital relationship – the most intimate between human beings. It is a rich word that describes a life together in which everything is shared. This is the word that John uses of our intimate relationship with God (v.3).

It also describes our relationship with one another. You can have deep genuine friendships and honest communication. There is no need for masks or ‘spin’ or ‘image’. You can be real before God and before others. The result is a level of authenticity, vulnerability and intimate connection with one another that is best summed up in this beautiful word, ‘fellowship’.

God has his own sense of timing: ‘With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day’ (2 Peter 3:8). He has perfect timing: never early, never late. God is never in a hurry, but he is always on time.

We see in today’s passages that the Lord is sovereign over the future (Daniel 4:32). ‘We are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth’ (2 Peter 3:13). God is going to vindicate his people (Psalm 135:14).

But what do you do while you are waiting for God to do what he has promised to do?

In successive weeks at HTB, I interviewed two people of courage and faith. One, Ben Freeth, inspired by his faith in Jesus Christ, had taken a courageous stance against the unjust regime in Zimbabwe. As a result, he was beaten, tortured and forced to watch his elderly mother-in-law and father-in-law undergo torture, from which the latter eventually died. Yet in the midst of his suffering, he chose to love and bless the torturers.

The second was a pastor from one of the sixty countries around the world where physical persecution of Christians still takes place. He had been imprisoned and, at one stage, sentenced to death for no other reason than his faith in Jesus Christ. Yet in the face of extreme suffering he refused to deny his faith.

The lives of men and women like this are hugely inspiring, challenging and motivational.

I studied and practised law for nearly ten years. In every legal case, evidence is vital. Evidence matters to me. I could not be a Christian if I did not believe that our faith is based on compelling evidence. There is good evidence for the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Over recent years, there has been a spate of books by the ‘new atheists’ suggesting that there is no evidence for God; that God is a ‘delusion’ (‘The God Delusion’) and that ‘God is Not Great’ (the title of another of these books). While of course, the Bible does not try to provide a scientific proof for the existence of God, it does point to the evidence of ‘eye-witnesses’ (2 Peter 1:16) and proclaims that ‘there is a God in heaven’ (Daniel 2:28) and that ‘the Lord is great’ (Psalm 135:5).

There is good reason to put your trust in God. You will grow in faith as you study the truth of God’s word and boldly proclaim that ‘there is a God’ and ‘he is great’.

Seeing a crowd of condemned criminals being led up to execution, John Bradford (c.1510–1555), the English reformer, is said to have remarked: ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford.’

In 1807, John Newton, best known as composer of the hymn, ‘Amazing Grace’, encapsulated the amazing grace of God in some of his last words as he lay dying. He declared: ‘I am a great sinner but Christ is a great Saviour.’

In today’s New Testament passage, Peter speaks of ‘the God of all grace’ (1 Peter 5:10). How should you respond to God’s great grace?

Father Raniero Cantalamessa is a Franciscan monk. In 1977, he was sent by the Vatican to be an observer at a conference in Kansas City, USA where there were 20,000 Catholics and 20,000 other Christians. On the last day of the conference, after someone had spoken about the tragedy of all the divisions in the body of Christ (the church), 40,000 people knelt in repentance. As Father Raniero looked out, he saw the words ‘JESUS IS LORD’ on a big neon sign over the conference venue. He describes how, at that moment, he caught a glimpse of what Christian unity is all about – 40,000 people kneeling in repentance under the Lordship of Jesus.

He asked ‘a lay Protestant’ to pray for him to experience more of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit filled him. He experienced God’s love for him in a new way. He found himself speaking ‘in a manner like speaking in tongues’. The Bible came alive in a new way. He received a new ministry. In 1980, he was invited by Pope John Paul II to be the preacher to the Papal Household. This is what he has been for the last thirty-seven years. Three themes dominate his remarkable ministry: unity, love and the Holy Spirit. They are distinct, but closely linked.